


Putting Down Roots

by Nebulad



Series: Sea of Stars [11]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Fluff, Gen, platonic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 11:23:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4958680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nebulad/pseuds/Nebulad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Javik didn’t see a point in risking friendship, not when any friend you made could be twisted into a monster and aiming a gun at you in another moment- but sometimes he wondered if friendship was what Faust offered. It was an odd feeling that he sensed in her- she had no desire to exchange in contemporary pity and comfort rituals like she did with the others- hugging the purple Quarian and watching foolish vids, silent pull-ups with the James-human, romance customs with the turian...</p><p>It was different with him, because she didn’t have any interest in shielding him. "You know more about how fucked up this all is than I do- it’d be insulting for me to try and hold your hand and tell you everything's gunna be okay," she’d said. It was what led to the exchange they were engaged in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Putting Down Roots

Javik and Faust had been speaking without speaking for about an hour and no one had noticed. The only time anyone said anything was when Faust leaned against the Prothean’s prickly shoulder, shutting her eyes- Jack whistled. That was it. Primitives remained remarkably oblivious.

They were showing each other things. Javik didn’t see a point in risking friendship, not when any friend you made could be twisted into a monster and aiming a gun at you in another moment- but sometimes he wondered if friendship was what Faust offered. It was an odd feeling that he sensed in her- she had no desire to exchange in contemporary pity and comfort rituals like she did with the others- hugging the purple Quarian and watching foolish vids, silent pull-ups with the James-human, romance customs with the turian...

It was different with him, because she didn’t have any interest in shielding him. _You know more about how fucked up this all is than I do- it’d be insulting for me to try and hold your hand and tell you everything's gunna be okay,_ she’d said. It was what led to the exchange they were engaged in.

She showed him Mindoir during the batarian slaver raid, and he smelled the smoke of burning buildings and listened to the high pitched wailing of civilians who did not know how to defend themselves. A woman with the same space-black hair as Shepard was cut down helping a group of children hide. A man with Faust’s nose took two slavers down with him. He watched the Commander as a child, paralyzed with fear under the dead bodies of some neighbours, until the one he recognized as the Anderson that had stayed behind on Earth to fight the Reapers found her.

He returns her memory with one of his own- the planet she had been born on, not Mindoir in his cycle but uninhabited and therefore untouched. It was a lush place, and he’d hated it. His ship had crashed on the surface with five casualties, leaving barely enough men to crew the damn thing when it got back into working shape.

Barely enough men to fix it.

Mindoir as he’d known it had been beautiful and beneath the Reaper’s notice, and Javik had hated it because it wasn’t war and it wasn’t convenient. He was not fool enough to simply appreciate something pretty if it was not also useful. One of the men remaining had cried at witnessing something that the war hadn’t found. Rage spiked inside him- he might’ve killed the idiot if he was not already short so many soldiers.

She showed him the first time she’d ever seen the Citadel, from the window of the Normandy when it was not yet her ship. Joker sat in the seat, still the pilot even three years back in her memory, and the other human Spectre Kaidan was watching over Shepard’s shoulder with an unfamiliar female. There was a rush of awe inside Faust’s chest, and her eyes widened in amazement- she had never seen a station so _large,_ or so mobile as the Citadel. It only got larger as they approached and she felt all at once lost and found.

There was a bonus rush of nostalgia and she briefly remembered meeting the turian. They met while shooting the mercenaries of their adversary, which did not surprise Javik in the least.

He gave her _his_ first impression of the Citadel, much more recent than most of his memories. He remembered being awestruck and then all at once blindsided by a horrible sense of loss. This was not _his_ Citadel, and when he boarded he would not miraculously find his people’s thriving society again. He would see more asari discussing biotics, more krogan discussing fish, and an endless supply of weeping refugees. Even this Citadel was not free from the war entirely, and he found with crushing disappointment that the areas that did seem unaffected by the mayhem across the galaxy did nothing but disgust him.

He remembered listening to soldiers under his command speak of the Citadel in quiet, dreamy voices- how it had once been an epicentre of culture and Prothean values. They breathed to each other in the dark that no one on the Citadel had ever gone to sleep hungry, and that even the streetlights were beacons of welcome and knowledge. He’d known they were being foolish, but did not begrudge them their fantasies. When they rebuilt the Empire after the Reapers returned to dark space, he resolved to make the Citadel all this and more for them.

And the crushing loss of rising from stasis pod and realizing there would be no Empire.

There was a physical connection between them, an invisible and metaphysical thread that linked their minds. He felt it humming and it was soothing to feel so close to another again- to share the weight and finality of being the _last._ He could share these memories with no one else, and not only because he did not care to, but because they would not understand. Shepard was the closest thing to a Prothean left in the Galaxy besides him.

“Uh, Shepard? I think Garrus is trying to rig the toaster to explode,” Tali’Zorah reported, shuffling up anxiously beside the reclining Commander and casting her eyes back between her and the offending turian.

“Tattletale!” Garrus replied furiously.

“I don’t even know what that means,” she protested, and Shepard’s eyes opened and she moved away. Her connection dropped, but there was a deep tranquility that remained.

The memory of the link was satisfactory, and he nodded at her as she left to go yank the cooking appliance away from her bondmate. Javik stood, moving over to the bar where the Traynor-human was mixing drinks. She stammered a little when he asked her to make him something _(“Anything, human. This cycle’s alcohol is weak in comparison to mine”)_ but obliged as the shuttle pilot tried to engage him in banter. Haltingly, he responded to their invitation of inclusion.

Out of all the things he had experienced in his time, friendship was far from the worst.

**Author's Note:**

> I love Javik??? Like if I had to pick a Prothean tbqh like. Romance preferences: Garrus->Thane->Javik->Everyone Else. I mean this obviously isn't a romantic story but I want him to be HAPPY DAMMIT


End file.
